


the human frame being what it is

by meanderingsoul



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Affection, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Gentleness, Late Night Conversations, Past Abuse, Post-Season/Series 03, Romantic Angst, goodnight kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 12:37:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17725346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: “I’d never, been around people like them,” Phryne said faintly, staring into the dark kitchen without seeing it.





	the human frame being what it is

 

It had been one of _their_ cases, but it was all _his_ reports to write and letting her help with it was quite impossible.

Finding out how brief and straightforward her own case files were had been the closest Jack had ever come to envying the private investigator’s lot over the more state-sanctioned one. Her records never required four distinctive copies, though they were kept to a level of professionalism he would have never expected at first, all names obscured by a simple cipher. He was far too familiar now with her careful bookkeeping and the meticulous inventory of artwork she kept up with to be surprised anymore.

All the same, she’d been done with her writing and had been reading sprawled in the parlor for an hour or so and he was still here, having covered her entire dining table with papers that needed to be done by end of day tomorrow.

Jack heard her sigh in the other room, a rustle as she turned off the lights. Her hand brushed across his shoulders.

“Come upstairs when you can’t keep your eyes open?” she said wryly.

“I will,” he murmured, and leaned up for a kiss. Her fingers threaded into his hair towards the base of his skill, tugged him into the warm familiarity of her kiss. She hummed low in her throat, smiled against his cheek and kissed him again before vanishing upstairs.

He’d much rather also be upstairs, but this was still far better than working late at the station, her footfalls above and a full meal in his belly instead of the night shift pacing around and the cells rattling downstairs.

It had just been a busy week. He started writing again with a resigned sigh.

It hadn’t even been an hour when Jack sensed her behind him, though he hadn’t heard her on the stairs. She really was very good at sneaking around, though it was something he avoided praising out loud.

Unfortunately, he’d probably be at this another hour, but when he looked up she was pale, holding her robe around herself tightly.

“Dream?” he asked, because he was allowed to ask these things now.

Phryne shook her head, sat sideways in the chair next to him and tucked her small toes under his leg. Jack hummed and kept writing, no sound but the tick of the clock, his pen against paper, and the occasional faint snore from Mr. Butler at the back of the house.

“We just reminded me of something,” she said eventually. He made a questioning sound and she added, “Earlier, something good and bad. But I avoided thinking about so much of those months for so long, I think I’d forgotten about some of my favorite parts.”

“Which months?”

“Paris, 1919.”

Jack didn’t make a sound, just wound his left arm under her calves. They hadn’t spoken directly about Dubois since the gendarme had agreed to his cremation in Melbourne. Sometimes the way she said things gave him hints. He’d liked none of them.

Phryne was remembering how dreamlike it had been, back in a busy city after two years near the front. No one knew her or where she was. Only Mac had known where she’d gone. There was little left of the money she’d taken with her. She hadn’t been as much of a dancer at that point and had no idea yet how to go about finding work singing. She drank too much and spent her nights in hostels or someone’s bed or sleeping on someone’s couch after a party. She’d been hungry often, but she’d spent so much more of her life hungry than not at that time it hadn’t really seemed to matter. Not enough to head home.

A street artist she’d sat near led to a proposition to sit for figure reference sketches, then another to pose for an abstract artist. It was enough to replace her shoes at a secondhand shop, buy a hat that almost fit to help contain her ragged hair.

Then she’d met the Sarcelles.

“I’d never, been around people like them,” she said faintly, staring into the dark kitchen without seeing it.

Somehow Jack doubted she meant either Parisians or artists, and them implied a plural, not DuBois. “The Sarcelle’s?”

“Mmhm. Them. The way they were together.”

“How so?”

Her eyes shifted to look at his arms around her legs. “In love. Unashamed to show it.”

Oh. Jack stopped pretending to still be working, leaned on his hand to watch her speak.

“I’d done a little modeling before I met them at a galerie opening. They were holding hands, never far from each other at all. Pierre spotted me in the lamplight and Veronique nodded and that was that.”

Jack snorted under his breath, because of course it only took one glance across a crowded room, rubbed her ankle with his thumb.

“And of course, portraits need figure sketches and then proper sketches before most artists ever touch a paintbrush.”

“Of course,” Jack echoed, as if he’d ever had anything to do with a portrait in his life, and she rolled her eyes.

“I was at their apartment almost every day for a while. They brought me to Café Anatole with them after, late at night when it was mostly artists. I met more people to sit for. But the Sarcelles, they’d let me sleep on the chaise sometimes, after posing, and I’d hear them laughing in the other room before bed. Or Veronique and I would go out for lunch and when we’d come back…

They were always, happy enough just to _see_ each other,” she said quietly.

Jack had only spoken with Veronique three times and had heard very little about Pierre, but it seemed a horrible waste that this man was the one who died while DuBois lived on another decade.

“I’d never known anyone like that. My parents…it could turn on its head so fast. Even if they’d been kissing in the kitchen that morning you couldn’t trust it. Uncle Edward was always kind enough, but he and Aunt P wouldn’t so much as kiss on the cheek in front of anyone. And I’d never really… It was captivating somehow.”

Jack tried to fathom the idea of that and couldn’t. His parents had been kind people and not the sort who worried much about a peck on the lips in front of their children or sitting too close on the sofa, not in the privacy of their own home. He and Rosie may have spent almost as many years apart as together during their marriage, but there had been plenty of times where affection came easy. Goodnight kisses and slipping on her coat with lingering hands.

He couldn’t imagine being that same age and having never _seen_ that kind of touch.

“I remembered watching her come kiss him goodnight while I was still posing for him and it had gotten late. How she put her arm around him in his chair where he was sketching. How he leaned up to kiss her.”

Almost the same as when she’d kissed him goodnight barely an hour ago. Oh Phryne.

“It’s nice. I thought it looked nice, back then.”

Jack finally put his pen down, twisted round to kiss the bend of one knee then the other, warm through the black silk. “It is nice.”

He didn’t say _it’s my favorite part_ or _it’s what I missed most when she finally left me_ or _it’s what I couldn’t dare to dream of having with you before_. She probably saw it in his face.

Phryne watched him with that soft, dark-eyed look that always made him want to hold her and smiled tremulously. “I’ll remember.”

Jack let go of her just long enough to shuffle his papers into some semblance of order at one end of the table. He’d have a busy morning, but it could wait. “Come back to bed Phryne.”

She held onto his hand up the stairs in the dark.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic idea that stemmed from a different fic idea I was working on and I'm unsure what level of fic-ception that counts as. That smile Phryne gives the Sarcelles from the chaise in 1x7 always caught my eye.
> 
> Title is from Virginia Woolf. I'm trying to keep to early 20th century literary titles instead of my favorite One Overdramatic Word. <3


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